All posts tagged Akio Toyoda

Toyota Motor Corp.’s dramatic profit recovery and CEO Akio Toyoda’s optimistic forecast for the coming fiscal year demonstrate three things about the auto business: Car companies are cyclical, size matters and favorable exchange rates still count for a lot.

Auto executives talk a lot about the importance of building vehicles in the markets where they’ll be sold, the better to avoid getting whipsawed by volatile currency exchange rates. They are putting money behind that talk — consider General Motors Co.’s announcement this week that it will build a Cadillac assembly plant in China, soon to be the world’s largest luxury vehicle market. Toyota recently said it will start building Lexus sedans in the U.S.

JAKARTA, Indonesia—Toyota Motor Corp. said it would increase its bet on Indonesia, planning to spend up to $2.7 billion to expand its capacity to better target the growing middle class in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda and other executives met with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his ministers over the weekend and outlined the auto maker’s Indonesia expansion plans. Toyota said the plans would cost around $1.3 billion over the next five years but could more than double as Indonesia’s economy grows.

June means annual shareholders meetings in Japan and pep talks to investors about better days ahead. At Toyota Motor Corp.’s session Friday, President Akio Toyoda attempted to accentuate the positive and bookend three tough years since taking over as head of his namesake company.

But some investors weren’t buying, wasting no time in the Q&A portion of the event to question core tenets of the company’s tactics and strategy.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Toyoda reminded shareholders that the auto maker was able to bounce back more quickly than expected last year from supply disruptions due to natural disasters in Japan and Thailand.

TOKYO—Buoyed by a five-fold surge in net income in the fiscal fourth quarter and a return to full production capacity, an upbeat Toyota Motor Corp. on Wednesday forecast a doubling of profits in the current fiscal year through March 2013.

Japan’s largest car maker by volume recorded a net profit of ¥121.0 billion ($1.51 billion) in the three months ended March, up from ¥25.4 billion a year earlier, marking the first quarterly growth in six quarters. The result beat analysts’ estimates for ¥112.9 billion net profit in a poll compiled by data provider FactSet.

TOYOTA CITY, Japan—Toyota Motor Corp. said Monday that it has reorganized its vehicle-development system in order to speed decision making, cut costs and better appeal to car buyers world-wide.

The changes to core engineering and design programs bolster the authority of the company’s chief engineers, consolidate research and development into three groups based on geographical regions and limit final design decisions to smaller teams. Toyota, Japan’s largest car maker, dubs the effort its new “global architecture.”

TOKYO—Toyota Motor Corp. expects that sales of its low-cost multipurpose vehicles in emerging markets to hit a million units as soon as this year, according to company documents released on Friday.

That would beat the record of 810,000 vehicles set in 2010, and represent 10% of the Japanese auto maker’s global sales forecast of 9.58 million vehicles this year. Taking advantage of the surging demand for cars in emerging markets world-wide is a goal of Toyota President Akio Toyoda. He has vowed to raise the emerging-market slice of the car maker’s total sales to 50% by 2015, from 40% last year.

Electric vehicles were on the lips of nearly every chief executive at the Tokyo Motor Show on Wednesday as they touted their future visions of the automotive industry.

Carlos Ghosn of Nissan Motor Co. declared that his company’s Leaf, currently the best-selling electric vehicle, is just the beginning of more promising vehicles to come. Later, Honda Motor Co. CEO Takanobu Ito espoused a company aim to help create a “zero society” with drastically reduced CO2 emissions, thanks in part to electric cars.

But then there was Akio Toyoda, the head of Toyota Motor Corp. “Personally, I love the smell of gasoline and the sound of the engine,” he declared, “so I hope this kind of vehicle never disappears.”

Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda said today the company will reorganize manufacturing functions to increase efficiency at domestic auto assembly units. But the president’s announcement, peppered with lofty expressions about how committed it is to the Japanese market, was as much about what the country’s largest auto maker did not do: move operations overseas.

As Japan Inc. continues to take hits from the rising yen onlookers speculated whether Toyota would move operations abroad. The yen’s relentless rise is a sharper sting for Toyota because nearly half of its global sales volume consists of cars made in Japan, more so than other domestic rivals.